A Guilty Thing Surprised Part 15

'You're an intelligent broad-minded man,' he said at last, 'but you're very conventional. I wonder if you really know yourself. You know what pleases you, but do you know what would disgust you?'

'Nothing Elizabeth could have done,' Quentin said obstinately.

'Perhaps not, but she believed it would have disgusted you, believed it so firmly that she was prepared to pay thirty thousand pounds to keep it from you.'

'If you say so,' Quentin said helplessly. 'Who could she ever have known that would extort money from her?'

'I was hoping you could tell me that. A servant?'

'Mrs Cantrip who has been devoted to us for sixteen years? Old Will who is respect itself? Sean who wors.h.i.+pped the very ground she walked on? You see yourself how absurd this is. Why should it be a servant, anyway?'

'It's more unlikely that it was one of her friends, isn't it, sir? A servant who lived in this house would have access to private papers, might have been an eye witness, might have discovered photographs.'

'Evidence of infidelity? I tell you, she knew I'd have understood. I'd have overlooked it, however much it hurt.'

Wexford stared at him, hardly able to contain his impatience. The man didn't know what life was. He spoke of infidelity as if it was always a straightforward and temporary preference for someone else, a matter of temptation, of love and of subsequent guilt. He was innocent. But Wexford wasn't. He had seen the letters even the most elevated and cultured lovers write to each other, the photographs elegant and fastidious women revel in posing for. Thirty thousand pounds might not be too great a price to pay to keep them from a husband's eye.

'You had a series of au pair girls, you told me.'

'Ordinary young girls,' Quentin said. 'Quite straightforward and happy to be here. They adored Elizabeth.'

Just like Katje did?

'Before the girls came,' said Wexford, 'you had a married couple. What was the name again?'

'Twohey,' said Quentin Nightingale.

The small white cottage was being scoured from top to bottom. When Wexford arrived, Mrs Cantrip abandoned the cleaning that had necessarily to be done on a Sat.u.r.day, and sat down with the ginger cat in her lap.

The room smelt strongly of polish and mothb.a.l.l.s.

'Twohey, sir?' she said. 'Mr Nightingale dismissed him for insolence. He never showed a proper respect, not from the start, and he never did a fair day's work, as far as I could see. Always hanging about where he wasn't supposed to be, snooping and listening, if you know what I mean.'

'And that was why he was sacked?'

The cat slithered to the floor and began sharpening its claws against a table leg. 'Stop that, Ginger,' said Mrs Cantrip. 'Well, things came to a head, sir, and that's a fact. A couple of weeks before he was sacked he got so disrespectful to Madam it was past bearing, and Madam always so gentle and never standing up for herself.' She picked up the cat and dropped it out of the window among the zinnias and dahlias. 'She caught him helping himself to Mr Nightingale's whisky, and when she spoke to him about it, he said, "There's plenty more where that came from," if you've ever heard the like.'

'And his wife?'

'She wasn't so bad. Under his thumb, if ehe truth were known. She took quite a fancy to me. Sent me a Christmas card two years running.'

'You know their address, then?' Wexford asked urgently.

'I never wrote back, sir,' said Mrs Cantrip, bristling a little with indignation. 'They weren't the kind of folks I'd care to a.s.sociate with. I did notice the first one had a Newcastle postmark.'

'Did they continue in service?'

'That I wouldn't know, sir. Twohey was always bragging and boasting, and he did say he was sick of the life. Going to set himself up in a hardware business, he said, but Mrs Twohey said to me, out of his hearing like, that it was all castles in the air. Where would they get the capital, sir? They hadn't a penny to bless themselves and that's a fact.'

Having left Sergeant Martin to begin the search for Twohey, Wexford drove down Tabard Road and parked in front of a bungalow whose pink front door matched the geraniums in its garden. Two children sat on a groundsheet on the lawn, but at opposite ends of it, as if they had put as much s.p.a.ce between them as was consistent with their mother's rule about not sitting on damp gra.s.s. The boy was cleaning paint brushes, the girl transferring caterpillars from a gla.s.s jar into a collection of matchboxes.

Wexford greeted them cheerfully, then strolled up to their father who was painting his garage doors. He noted with an inward chuckle that Burden looked anything but pleased to see him.

'Carry on painting,' said Wexford. 'I like watching other people work. You needn't look so worried. I only want you to lend an ear while I talk.' And he told Burden about the jewellery and about Twohey.

Behind them the children, who had been silent since Wexford's arrival, began a soft though fierce bickering.

'I was wondering if what this Twohey found out was the secret of Villiers' and Mrs Nightingale's intense dislike of each other. There's no doubt Nightingale is very attached to Villiers, and if he found out his wife had once done her brother some dreadful injury ...'

'But what dreadful injury, sir?' Burden dipped his brush into the paint, sc.r.a.ping the bottom of the tin. 'Look at my two,' he said bitterly. 'They really seem to hate each other and there's no cause for it, as far as I can see. They've been like cat and dog ever since John was a toddler and Pat in her pram.'

'It'll be different when they're grown up.'

'But will it? Why shouldn't the Villiers-Nightingale case be a parallel?

Apparently you get these cases of brothers and sisters who are absolutely incompatible.'

'They were separated,' Wexford said. 'They never had a chance to adjust to each other in the late teens and early twenties. If you separated Pat and John, then they might turn out like Villiers and Elizabeth, because one or other of them might let an old grievance smoulder. Your two will grow more tolerant from daily contact.'

'I don't know,' said Burden. 'Sometimes I think of sending one of them away to boarding school.'

'But you can see that separation doesn't work, Mike.' Wexford sat down on the short stepladder. 'I wonder if it's possible that Twohey killed her himself? If it was he she met in the forest and he killed her when she told him her source of supply had come to an end?'

'Then how,' Burden objected, 'did he get hold of the torch? He was the last person to have access to the garden room at the Manor.'

'True. Now, let's see. Our case against Georgina falls to the ground because now we know Georgina had no motive. Villiers remains a possibility. He could have killed her because, her money having come to an end, she told him she would reveal everything to Nightingale. That b.l.o.o.d.y secret, whatever it was. Sean could have killed her because he saw her with another man.'

'No, sir. We know it was premeditated. The killer took the torch with him.'

Burden placed his brush on his paint rag and turned the now empty tin upside down. 'John!' he called, then, 'John!' more loudly to make his voice heard above the quarrelling. 'Go into the shed, will you, and fetch me another tin of pink?'

'I can't. It's pitch dark in there and the bulb's gone.'

'Well, take a torch, then. Don't be so feeble, and leave your sister's things alone.'

'Encouraging garden pests,' said John scathingly. He got up with a sigh, trailed into the open garage and reached up for a torch which stood on a high shelf.

Wexford watched him, saying slowly, 'Of course. Why didn't I think of it before? We realised almost from the first that when you're going into a place that you know will be dark you take a torch with you. But you take your own torch, don't you? Everyone owns a torch. John knew exactly where his torch was and he fetched it as a matter of course. We've been daft, Mike. We thought of someone going to the Manor and taking the Nightingales' torch. But why should they? What possible purpose could there be in going out of your way in securing a weapon that was the property of the woman you intended to kill? Why not bring your own?'

'But the murderer didn't bring his own,' Burden objected. He struck his forehead with the flat of his hand, leaving a broad pink smear. 'No, I'm being stupid. You mean that, if we exclude Nightingale himself, the only possible person to have taken that torch into the wood was Elizabeth herself?'

'That's what I mean. And you know what else it means? No one would choose a torch as a murder weapon if there was anything else to hand. Therefore, no one planned this murder. The killer premeditated nothing. He (or she) was overcome by an impulse of the moment and struck Elizabeth Nightingale with the torch she herself had brought with her.'

Burden nodded gravely. 'She brought it,' he agreed, 'but someone else put it back.'

And, Wexford asked himself, how did Villiers know the jewels were fakes?

14.

WEXFORD walked to church with his wife and left her at the gate. Without any religious feeling himself, he sometimes went to morning service to please her. Today his office called him as peremptorily as the church bells had called her, but with a silent beckoning finger.

Burden was already there, busy at the phone, setting in motion the search for Twohey.

'Born in Dublin about fifty years ago,' Wexford heard him say. 'Dark, Irish-looking, small eyes, cyst at the left corner of his mouth unless he's had it removed. One conviction, fraudulent conversion while he was a hotel manager in Manchester in 1954. That's right, could be in your Newcastle or Newcastle under Lyme. Keep in touch.' He put the receiver down and grinned wryly at his superior.

'You've been doing your homework,' Wexford said when Burden handed him a photograph of the man he had described. 'I thought I told you to take last evening off and finish your painting?'

'I have finished it. Anyway, I didn't do my homework last night, but I was up bright and early this morning. I've been having a conference with Mrs Cantrip.'

'Has she any idea how the money was paid over to Twohey?'

Burden closed the window. He didn't care for the sound of the bells. 'It was all news to her. I don't think she really took it in. Her Mrs Nightingale being blackmailed!'

'She'd never heard of such a thing,' said Wexford with a grin, 'and that's a fact?'

'Something like that. She's sure Twohey isn't in the neighbourhood because if he was his wife would have come to see her.'

Wexford shrugged. Burden had planted himself in the solidly built swivel chair, so there was no help for it but to settle for one of the flimsier seats. He glared at the inspector and said coldly, 'Why should he be in the neighbourhood?'

'Because maybe it was him,' Burden said ungrammatically, 'that Mrs Nightingale met in the forest.'

'It's blackmailers that get killed, not their victims.'

'Suppose she told him her source had dried up? He might have killed her in a rage. We know it wasn't premeditated, don't we? Thank goodness those bells have stopped.' He opened the window again, raising the blind so that the sun streamed into Wexford's eyes. Wexford s.h.i.+fted his chair irritably.

'Or Sean Lovell might have seen them together and mistaken the reason for their meeting and ...'

'So you're coming round to young Lovell yourself now, are you?'

'I've felt differently about him since he told me he took a knife to his mother when he was a young lad and saw her with one of her men. Besides, there's the money he gets. I bet she told him she was leaving him all her money and she might not have said how much. He'd have thought it was a h.e.l.l of a lot more than it was.'

'Come off it, Mike. He either killed her from jealousy or he killed her for gain. The two don't go together.' Wexford got up. 'Well, I'm off to stand Lionel Marriott a drink in the Olive.'

Burden picked up the phone once more. 'Very nice,' he said distantly. 'I'm sorry I'm too busy to join you.'

'Wait till you're asked,' Wexford snapped. Then he chuckled. ' "Blessed is he," Mike, "that sitteth not in the seat of the scornful." '

'Well, it's your seat, sir,' said Burden blandly.

It was funny the way Burden seemed to have taken over everything these days, Wexford thought as he hung over the Kingsbrook Bridge, waiting for the Olive and Dove to open and for Marriott to come. When he looked back on the past week's investigations it seemed to him that Burden had done most of the enquiries while he had sat listening to Marriott's stories. Perhaps he was exaggerating. But Burden was certainly proving to be right in his theories. About the lack of premeditation, for instance, and Katje wanting to marry Nightingale and Georgina Villiers being just a nice ordinary woman. Soon, no doubt, he would have a theory as to the secret and another to account for Sean's non-existent alibi. He dropped a chipping from the bridge parapet into the water. Our young men shall see visions, he thought, and our old men shall dream dreams ....

'A penny for your thoughts,' said Marriott, tapping him on the shoulder.

'I was thinking I'm getting old, Lionel.'

'But you're the same age as I am!'

'A little younger, I think,' said Wexford gently. 'It's just struck me, this case is full of people who are too old for other people. It reminds me that I'm older than the lot of them.' He looked up at the serene Suss.e.x sky, cloudless and brilliant. 'An old man in a dry month,' he said. 'An old man on a dry case ...'

'The Olive won't be dry,' said Marriott. 'Come on, Gerontius, let's have that drink.'

On sunny days the patrons of the Olive could have their drinks at tables in the garden. It was a dusty little garden, rather arid, but Wexford and Marriott, like most Englishmen, felt it almost a duty to sit outside when the sun shone, for fine weather came so seldom and lasted so short a time.

'But I've told you the whole story, Reg,' Marriott said. 'There isn't any more.'

'That from you?'

'I'm afraid so, unless you want me to embroider it with my own ideas.'

Wexford picked a leaf out of his drink and looked irritably up into the tree from which it had fallen. He said sharply, 'Do you think it possible that Villiers is h.o.m.os.e.xual?'

'Oh, my dear, I shouldn't think so.'

'And yet you say he had no women friends between his marriages.'

'He didn't have any men friends either.'

'No? What about Quentin Nightingale?'

'Quentin certainly isn't. I've a shrewd suspicion he's chasing that little Dutch girl. Gone overboard for her, if you ask me. I grant you Denys's feelings for his wives have only been lukewarm, but Quen was in love with Elizabeth when he met her and now he's in love again.'

Wexford wasn't going to betray Nightingale's confidence even by a nod of agreement. 'I wondered,' he said, 'if Elizabeth knew her brother was h.o.m.os.e.xual and hated him for it but was prepared to go to considerable lengths to keep it dark.'

'I don't see why she'd get murdered for that.'

Finis.h.i.+ng his drink, Wexford decided not to breathe a word to Marriott about the blackmail payments. 'No, it's more likely she was seen in the forest with a man and the person who saw her killed her.'

He added thoughtfully, ' "My little songbird, the only true Nightingale in Myfleet." '

In an eager helpful voice, Marriott said, 'Perhaps he's Quen's natural child. Will Palmer's always going about saying "he never had no father".

How about that?'

'What have you been reading?' Wexford snapped. 'Mrs Henry Wood? The Marriage of Figaro?'